I heard the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in a long time a couple of weekends ago, when my brother graduated from high school. (There was an invocation, too. I semi-bowed my head and looked around during it, and saw a couple in front of me not even doing that. Could have hugged them.) I don’t say the Pledge—partly, that has to do with this whole “under God” thing, but it’s also partly because there’s something really off-putting about teaching kids as young as four or five to say a daily affirmation to a nation and embedding things like “liberty and justice for all” in their brains as truisms and not truths.

You don’t say truths. You see truths.

In any case, I’m glad Michael Newdow (who gets “atheist” as his title, laughably, as if Fox would slap “Christian” up under Rick Warren or something; I suppose “doctor/lawyer” might have scared some viewers, though) argues well, and calmly, and with facts and logic. I’m also glad he’s not the one trying to justify America’s creep of religion by pointing to a picture of Moses in a government building or saying that the small minority should just deal with what the majority says, or trying to say that 95% of the country is some sort of Christian.

I wonder what will happen when some smart, non-Christian religious person (or his/her son/daughter) substitutes Allah, or Jehovah, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or Jah, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the Pledge. Are we going to have a debate about how slanted towards a Christian God our culture is, and how intolerant of other depictions of God we really are? Are we even equipped to have that debate?

I liked this one mostly for the complete inability to grasp sarcasm, and this immortal line: “If you don’t stand up and fight for it, it might just disappear!”

It is Christianity in that context. But how often was that said for slavery?

It was totally my fault, and I acknowledge and accept that. I was making a right on red, only checked oncoming traffic from the left, and darted into the lane just ahead of a minivan that was zipping in, making a left from the opposite corner of the intersection. (For anyone from Rockledge who is reading this: It’s the right you make turning onto Barnes from Murrell.)

In any case, I got the full blast of that woman’s horn. There was no accident, because I was quick to accelerate out of the turn and she braked in time. But there was plenty of anger. She honked twice, flipped me the bird in my rearview, and rolled down her window to yell something as I prepared to make a left turn out of the lane to my left.

I couldn’t hear her—I live in Florida, I drive with the windows up—but I’m sure it was some profanity with an exclamation point at the end.

And that was really the purpose of the exercise, wasn’t it? I wronged her; she got to be righteously angry and respond in kind. No one got hurt, and because anger just sort of diffuses when let out into the world like that, it’s fun, even cathartic, to let it go.

But this question kept popping up: Why get mad about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?

Like with everything else in my life, I thought about this in the context of something that happened on the Internet.

Deadspin’s new purge of commenters today (which is the second-most trafficked post on Deadspin today, behind Ozzie Guillen doing something unspeakably awesome with a baseball) reminded me of the last time that happened.

People got mad.

It eventually, indirectly, led to this (miss you, pictures), which led to this, which led to this. I was sincerely mad then; I get sincerely mad when I’m not taken seriously or dismissed, when my mom gets involved, or when something significantly injurious is done to me or to someone I love. That’s about it.

But the Internet makes tossed-off diatribes even easier than a extended middle finger. Someone has to see you, and your middle finger, for the bird to be effective; you can fire barbs at people anonymously on the Internet after a bit of gnashing and wailing at the keyboard, and never visit that site, read that blog, look at that person on Twitter, or watch one of that person’s YouTube vlogs again.

Sniping is cool, but it’s an ultimately lonely thing. Take someone down from afar and anonymously with a bon mot, and you’re just masturbating with your diction. Attach a name to it, though, and it gets better, because you can share it and gang up on people, and enjoy the second-best thing about snark—the first is that it’s infinite—it’s regarded as a valuable weapon in the writer’s arsenal in the 21st century.

Flipping the bird is done because you get to do it to someone, and in that moment, it’s you-on-me violence. A snarky comment is doing something to “someone,” but even though it takes a moment, it will likely last and could lead to something more. That’s got something to do with the permanence of words, whether agate on newsprint or Tahoma on WordPress, and the way a moment of rage can turn something on the Internet into a singed garden instead of the cigarette burn it would have caused in reality.

Anger, bizarrely, matters more on the Internet than it does in real life.

I can’t really replay getting the bird. But I can go back and look at pithy, pissy blog comments.

I wonder why I sometimes leave the latter and never flip the former.

That's totally the school's fault.

From here.

Note to parents: Your child and/or teen “hanging around the wrong people and making bad choices” is not entirely a reflection on where he or she goes to school. And if you had read the article, you might understand that part of the reason for keeping certain numbers of free and reduced school lunch-eligible students at schools is to maintain eligibility for federal funding, otherwise known as a good deal of the money that made that “great elementary school” possible.

Living in the “right” school’s zone does nothing in and of itself; there’s no magic school that can make your child successful.

And there’s no “right side of the line” because there are no public schools in Brevard County where a student with dedicated parents or adult figures, a little bit of gumption, and a bit of extra work cannot get an excellent K-12 education. I have friends who have been there and I’ve been there myself. It just doesn’t happen that students fall into black holes of education in Brevard County, because there is enough good done by the district to keep good teachers around and good facilities in place for students to do well.

The tools are there for you, noleygirly. If you really feel strongly about this, instead of commenting on a website, go to the school board meeting and voice your opinion. If not, please read this with your child and consider the content.

Any November a school board seat is on the ballot, bigjohn1. That’s when.

I still dislike flying, but flying is a lot better than a 1.5 mile walk for dinner. Considering that was done on sidewalks and freshly cut grass, on a cool evening, with any danger of anything more serious than complaints, I have reached the conclusion that we, as a group, are pansies.

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Also, the phrase “bloated corpse” is so much more fun after dinner.

America’s best-performing school districts may succeed for all kinds of reasons you can’t replicate in other districts: parents who have the initiative and resources to move to good districts for their children, better environments, teachers with extraordinary talent choosing to teach in the best schools.

I peel this comment from here to note that there is one answer to all of the above: Money.

The parents who have the “initiative and resources” to find good schools for their kids have it; the “better environments” are funded by it; the “teachers with extraordinary talent” are wooed by it. Money can buy you excellent education in the United States, and will in the private sector whether or not the public sector is providing one.

The argument that is made to redirect money from public education to private education carries with it the addled logic that the private sector, by virtue of not being an arm of the government alone, will be better. I charge that the mismanagement of funding to this point that has created this problem is not endemic to the public sector because of the public sector’s innate qualities, but because the public sector must fight the private sector on how money should be divvied up between the two sides rather than how it should be best spent to enhance a good/service, public education, that lifts all tides.

Oh, and go ahead and replace “education” with “health care” and see what you think.

But there are fundamental misunderstandings and oversights of a few things at play here that make that anxiety at least premature. First, on Twitter, another reporting, from the Guardian, has a more complete reasoning for why teens don’t use the site.

“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” (Robson) wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”

This is not surprising: 60 percent of U.S. users fail to return a month after signing up, and the lion’s share of tweets are authored by a small percentage of Twitter users. So teens in the U.K. aren’t far off from what people in the U.S. do with Twitter, and, without the interaction Twitter provides with a group of friends, it loses its appeal quickly.

But the credit and texting claim seems to confuse the issue. Though Twitter can be used by texting an SMS message from a mobile device, it is a small percentage that uses that medium. And, besides the monetary cost of a text, it’s cognitively difficult to text 140-character updates to Twitter for a generation chatting with itself in 160-character SMS missives; that Twitter sends back a message when mobile updates are too long probably turns more cost-conscious teens off as well.

Robson also writes what appears to me, a contemporary, to be obvious truths: Teens prefer online, bite-sized news to print sources they “can’t be bothered” to read; teens dislike intrusive advertising, finding it “extremely annoying,” but can deal with viral marketing if it’s funny; teens are “reluctant” to spend money on music when it can be accessed freely on the Internet, downloading much of their music from illegal sources; teens dislike wired and immobile forms of communication and like touch screens.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, except for the frightening quote it elicits:

The schoolboy was asked by the bank’s European media analysts to report on what he and his peers look for in the information-entertainment industries. What they got was one of the “clearest and most thought-provoking insights we have seen,” the analysts said.

This is clear and thought-provoking and worthy of media buzz? Do these analysts not have children? Do they not talk to them? Is this really not obvious to people in these industries?

I implore you, Morgan Stanley: If you’re going to commission a report from a 15-year-old (which, frankly, I will keep a level of skepticism about until I read it), at least don’t act like he reinvented the wheel. You’re going to look bad for being clueless rather than clairvoyant for hiring a young intern.

These aren’t revelations, and that they should be treated as such seems to indicate a significant disconnect between my generation and the people trying to sell things to them.

Update: The link to the full paper is here.

From Ms. Mac Arthur's blog.

Dear Ms. Hailey Laine Isadora Mac Arthur,

I don’t know you. But I know you’re wrong.

I’m not a Journalism major at the University of Florida; I’m an English major. But I used to be a Journalism major. I used to dream of writing the columns and stories you find in Sports Illustrated or The Sporting News; I used to want to change the world by telling stories while getting the frissons of joy a byline bestows.

I changed majors for two reasons. First, journalism as a field was something I could no longer see myself pursuing as a career.

Second, it was hard.

A journalist has many rules to follow, but, above all, must digilently strive to adhere to truth, to telling a story as fully and faithfully as possible. It is a daunting, demanding task at its most basic level of simple reporting of facts, even removed from the artistry some journalists weave into their stories. If truth is not delivered, in any way, the journalist, reporting facts, has failed.

And that, Hailey Mac Arthur, is what you have done, if the charges leveled against you are proven true.

Maybe The Alligator’s sharp rebuke won’t be enough. Maybe William McKeen’s disappointment won’t be enough. Maybe your college’s dismay won’t be enough. Maybe even a public shaming by Gawker, with all the attendant snark, won’t be enough. (I’ll wager that you read Gawker.)

You’ve been compared to Maureen Dowd and Carrie Bradshaw on Gawker, and, in my discussions with other people about this incident, Bill Plaschke, and you would probably be pleased with those comparisons. Your interview with Gay Talese gives the reader reason to cringe from the lede to the last period, but is at least well-written. You write in your bio about this internship you no longer have and the next one, which involves “jet(ting) off” to Brazil in September. You tout yourself as an “award-winning journalist,” rather than a journalist who has won awards.

All of that self-congratulatory and laudatory tripe means nothing at this moment, and may never be more than soothing whispers for your ego, because you are a plagiarist.

Maybe the most offensive sentence in your bio is this:

UF’s College of Journalism and Communications touts one of the top 10 journalism schools in the nation, you know.

That same institution that lends you its estimable name when it accepts and agrees to educate you is the one whose good name you coated in soot with these charges of plagiarism. The Alligator’s response is scathing:

Not only did Mac Arthur create a stigma against our beloved J-School (thanks, because as if finding internships wasn’t hard enough already, now we come from ‘that school’), she disappointed the peers and professors who previously held her in high esteem.

A quick look at the comments of the news article reporting finds shock and dismay from your peers.

From “eavoss”:

This is frustrating. Here was a reporter I really looked up to (her August 2008 story on the erotic dancers suffering from the economic recession was fantastic), and I am completely shocked.

This is a sad day for the UF College of Journalism. I’d hate to be McKeen or Foley right now.

From “Dominick”:

The first thing that came to my mind when I heard about this was: “Why?”

Ms. Mac Arthur is a very talented writer, from everything I’ve read of her’s in the past. Was it the pressure of feeling unable to live up to yourself? Impress you editors? Dazzle readers?

The stolen lines seemed to me more like lifted form, not facts. I’d love to know why she decided to rip off the Times (including a first-person account about losing a child, no less).

I don’t know what I feel worse about — knowing that people might now associate UF’s j-school with plagiarism, or that our faculty, for all their labors, have been let down.

Forget my background as a former Journalism major: As a UF student, the idea that there is someone I could have graduated with committing a betrayal of their education this heinous is appalling.

Though the football team’s struggles to abide by the law have been well-documented, those are issues of personal, not professional conduct. And those reflect poorly first and foremost, in my mind, on the student-athletes involved, and do not sully the reputation of entire and apparently innocent colleges.

You should know, Hailey, that your single colossal error might be enough to cause editors to doubt whether UF students should be considered for internships, to cause professors to doubt whether their lectures are worth giving, to destroy much of the sterling brand the UF College of Journalism and Communications has.

You should know those things because they are far easier conclusions for the outsider to reach than the little-known truth of the school’s lofty rankings.

You should know that this is far bigger than you. And you should know better than this.

Perhaps the most offensive thing about all of this, though, is how what isn’t on your blog reflects your seeming inability to grasp that you have made the wrong move in not responding to your firing.

You’re a Journalism major, and you’re savvy enough to have a blog; by the accounts I’ve read, you also have substantial talents as a storyteller.

Why not control your own news cycle? Why delete your Facebook and other online profiles? Why not immediately and sincerely apologize for doing what you did and try to earn back some shreds of the esteem others held you in by submitting yourself to the consequences?

Playing the ostrich and hiding your head in the sand makes you look guilty and fearful. Playing penitent and owning up to your mistake would be as noble and courageous as you could be in this situation.

Not only would you seize control of your “message,” whatever it could be, you would continue to make a name for yourself; though this comes out of the most salacious and ethically bankrupt situations a journalist could face, you can be sure that your name is now known in a few more newsrooms than it was yesterday.

And you may yet get a second chance, if your talents and work ethic can somehow restore faith in your ability to be a competent and honest journalist.

But how do you want those people in those newsrooms to respond to you when you interview for a job? They have already seen you trample on journalism’s ethics; will you have a response for the inevitable question, ”Why not apologize?”

If you were able to see that, in this increasingly public world, your best bet to fight fire is not fleeing but rather facing it, with your own voice, you would perhaps earn back an iota of respect from the people who worked with you and taught you everything you tossed to the wind with your foolishness.

But, then, I may be giving you more credit than you deserve.

Sincerely,

Andy Hutchins, UF 2011

South Africa and America are really not that different.

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Sometimes things just fall into your lap.

After a day spent picking up souvenirs from the market (and, I swear, playing mini-golf a hundred feet from the water in Cape Town), we, as a group, went out to find a place that would have spicy, perhaps Indian food that would go well with our wine.

The first place our driver took us to was closed, but our driver took the liberty of talking to the owner, who he apparently knew, to confirm this for us. That was nice.

The contingency location was also closed. But, to the infinite credit of our driver, he talked to the proprietors, still in the restaurant. And to their infinite credit, they served us.

And they served us a full meal of Cape Malay cuisine.

And they served it while they were putting on a birthday part for a family member.

And it was unequivocally the best meal of my life.

We tipped as well as we could. And we’ll never forget the food or the hospitality. That night, our last in Cape Town, we learned that kindness and understanding are universal.

I certainly won’t forget the view, either.

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Yeah, I still hate flying. That is all.

Robben Island is a desolate place, a rocky outpost for seals and seagulls with a bunch of spare buildings dotting the center of the island. It is easy to see why it was used as a leper colony; it is easy to see why it was used as a prison.

But from what we were told and what I know of Nelson Mandela’s confinement there, it seems like the prison did not own its prisoners; they owned their circumstances and kept their dignity.

If a prison can feel like a home, I suspect Robben Island did, in a strange, perverse way.

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I don’t claim to know everything about sports. I didn’t know anything about cricket until this trip.

But I can tell you I’m taking it back to the States with me. It’s like baseball, sped up and given soccer announcers; it won’t succeed as a sport in the States except in the fast-paced T20 format, but I like it.

And I now own it, in my little way.

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Table Mountain owns a bit of my soul that I will never get back. I’m okay with this.

I don’t really remember much of it, though. China’s a big deal! Zuma’s good with people! And some other stuff!

It was a fire hose class and I could only absorb so much.

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I’m not sure there really is a good American comparison for the disparity between Alexandra and Sandton. A half-hour away from smileys being grilled on the street, there’s a bronze statue of Mandela and an assortment of restaurant far nicer than most American strip malls.

No, that wasn’t jarring. Not at all.

On the bright side, I did get a pepperoni pizza. I missed those.

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More political science today. I think I could distill everything to a sentence, but I highly doubt that sentence will be intelligible.

While everyone else was ranting and raving about the lion cubs at Lion Park (which, to be fair, were quite cute), I watched the cheetahs. Those are magnificent animals, the Ferraris of the feline kingdom, if I’ve ever seen magnificence. But they were caged up, pacing, ready to uncoil at any moment.

Cheetahs are not meant to be caged.